CNN’s MAGA mouthpiece Scott Jennings is getting it from both sides for “parroting” President Donald Trump’s Iran lies.
Jennings, a Republican strategist, undercut the network’s reporting on the war when he said he had been informed by Trump administration sources that the U.S. strikes were a magnanimous act to cancel out planned Iranian attacks. Earlier the same day, however, CNN had published a bombshell report contradicting these claims.
This rankled staff at the network, according to Status. And now Jennings has been blasted from the right, too. Megyn Kelly, on her eponymous SiriusXM podcast, accused Jennings of sycophantic behavior towards the administration, who, she says, feeds him lines to parrot.
On her Monday show, Kelly touched on the “massive divisions” over the decision to strike Iran, taking the side of a war dove rather than a hawk. “Our government’s job is not to look out for Iran, or for Israel. It’s to look out for us,” Kelly said. She added that it seems like “Israel’s war.”
The former Fox News host said President Donald Trump has “difficulty defining” why the U.S. is part of the war and complained that she has found his explanations “lacking.”
She questioned Trump’s pronouncement that the U.S. was facing an “imminent threat.”
“OK, what is it? What’s the imminent threat?” she said, before turning her ire towards Jennings.
“We saw CNN’s Scott Jennings, who’s always talking to the administration, parroting this over the weekend, posting on X, quote ‘Senior Trump admin officials telling me that credible intel indicated that Iran planned pre-emptive missile strikes against U.S. military targets in the region, and against civilian targets as well,’” Kelly said.
Jennings’ post went on: “Failure to act would have resulted in mass civilian casualties.”
“Does that make any sense to you?” Kelly said curtly. “I mean, stop and think about it for a minute. I’m close to this administration in many ways as well. But I don’t allow them to use me like a fool.”
She said it was “obvious” that the Trump administration’s claims did not “make sense.”
Indeed, U.S. intelligence experts believe that Trump’s claims about Iranian threats to the U.S. are vastly exaggerated. While the country has a vast arsenal of short and medium-range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel and U.S. military bases in the Middle East, it is years away from producing the intercontinental ballistic missile Trump warned of. Sources told CNN that any suggestion otherwise is false.
Kelly noted reports that stated Trump officials acknowledged in closed-door briefings that there “was no intelligence” that suggested Iran would imminently attack.
She surmised that Trump merely blustered to “justify” his operation in Iran.
Her comments came after CNN staffers were reportedly furious with Jennings for contradicting the network’s reporting. The anger was at such a level that senior CNN leadership was made aware of the backlash, Status noted. Multiple people at the network were said to be “frustrated, to put it mildly.”
In January, CNN chief Mark Thompson faced pointed questions from staff at an all-hands meeting over why Jennings was permitted to continue breaching the network’s editorial standards on air, including repeatedly describing undocumented immigrants as “illegal aliens.”
Thompson said the network does not “police contributors” to “the same extent” as its journalists.
Following an on-air blow-up with Jennings that month, CNN contributor Julie Roginsky went nuclear on her fellow panelist and the network on her Salty Politics Substack.
In a withering take-down of Jennings, she wrote that CNN’s main issue was that it continues to book the shouty Trump acolyte known for his ultra-partisanship. “CNN once sold itself as the grown-up in the room,” she wrote, adding that “continued reliance on Scott Jennings is not just baffling, but corrosive to its brand.”
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